Tuesday, July 31, 2007

She was beautiful,Beautiful to my eyes.From the moment I saw her,The sun filled the sky.She was so so beautiful,Beautiful just to hold.In my dreams she was spring timeWinter was cold.

I stopped by Pheasant Branch Conservancy to take a few nature photos. I can see summer beginning to fade in the colors of the prairie flowers; Common Yellowthroats and other birds showing worn plumages. Definite southbound migrants included a few shorebirds foraging in the retention pond. By the end of next week I'll begin looking for the first fall warbler flocks along the stream corridor, and that means birding with Sylvia and Dottie. I know they're both super excited to have the neotropicals coming through again.

I have so few words when there's nothing controversial to write about. The truth is, though, when it comes to the natural world, there's always something controversial I could write about. Sometimes it's far healthier for me to just take in the greatest show on earth and say nothing at all. If I manage to collect a few images along the way, this is where they'll be. Pretty cool crab spider, huh?

Have you ever taken a window seat flight across the United States? How about Google Earth - have you ever looked at the high-resolution satellite photographs of our patchworked landscape? Scenes like the ones accompanying this blog post are common coast to coast. Though you'll see that there are still rich natural areas in the US, virtually none are untouched. Thanks to organizations like The Nature Conservancy, some habitats are being restored. But habitat loss and fragmentation remains the primary cause of the decline of bird populations. In his book "The Song of the Dodo," David Quammen diagnoses the problem with an effective analogy:

"Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor-sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, each one a rectangle, two feet by three. Never mind the hardwood floor. The severing fibers release small tweaky noises, like the muted yelps of outraged Persian weavers. Never mind the weavers. When we're finished cutting, we measure the individual pieces, total them up - and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpetlike stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."